Emmanuel Macron, according to the some of the more hyperbolic press, is all that stands between us and the end of Western civilization. In the wake of the U.K.’s decision to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s election, a populist president in France would mean three strikes and the liberal world order is out. It is apocalyptic thinking, but it captures the current mood and places a greater than usual weight on an untested presidential candidate. Nonetheless, those outside the country know little about him in terms of how he sees France’s place in the world or how he would drive French foreign policy.

In fairness, it is not clear that there is much to know. Macron has little experience or record in foreign policy. Most French politicians climb the greasy pole of French policymaking for two or three decades before they make much of a stir. Macron, in contrast, is 39 years old and has little experience in policymaking. He has never been elected to office, he only entered politics (as an adviser to President Hollande) about five years ago, and his only political job was a brief stint as Minister of the Economy from 2014 to 2016.

In France, foreign policy is central to national identity, and the president has extensive authority on defense matters. So Macron’s inexperience means he needs to reassure the electorate that he can manage the national security state. Perhaps for this reason, Macron has attached himself to a key member of Hollande’s governments—minister of defence Jean-Yves Le Drian. He has also explicitly rested his foreign policy on the so-called “Gaullo-Mitterrandist consensus”, i.e. the foreign policy wisdom handed down by two former French presidents: Charles De Gaulle and Francois Mitterrand.

Following those examples, Macron does not spend much time on the “soft” foreign policy issues that are trendy on the center-left, such as global governance and development assistance. During the campaign, Macron, whose background is in economic issues, has increasingly placed an emphasis on security, articulating a willingness to act forcefully abroad to defend French interests. This hard-nosed approach helps convey the sense that Macron is no callow youth.

More specifically, Macron has laid down a foreign policy programme that seeks to be similarly solid and serious. As usual for candidates, the programme is far from fully formed; it is long on rhetoric and short on hard choices. But it is possible to see beyond the rhetoric three basic conceptual pillars from which all else flows:

Openness

Macron has a vision of the world in which rapid change and ever denser interconnections are the only constants. France, for all its proud history and record of achievements, cannot simply shut itself off from the world and wish away the changes swirling around it. Moreover, withdrawing from the world would contradict France’s identity as a country with ambitions to shape the global arena. Instead, it must find a way to remain open and to thrive.

There is optimism in this worldview: Macron sees “a world of threats and opportunities.” France has considerable assets—a dynamic population, a strong export sector, international status, and a powerful military. These assets mean that France’s decline can be reversed. But this is possible only if a French leader can both motivate the necessary reforms to France’s domestic structures and preserve the kind of openness from which France will gain strength.

This faith in France and in the value of openness translates into a clear, universalist message. Macron sees a France which is open to trade and investment. It is open because it has the capacity to absorb and benefit from such flows, and to enforce the rules of the road and insist on reciprocity from its major partners. Even when it comes to refugees, which many in France see as a burden, Macron sees an “economic opportunity” for France and Europe. This faith in open borders extends beyond economic arguments, with Macron also refusing to close the door on Turkish membership in the EU.

Independence

Macron’s optimistic yet competitive approach to openness hints at the second pillar of his foreign approach: independence. Independence is a traditional French foreign policy virtue and a characteristic of nearly every French leader and presidential candidate since De Gaulle. Macron’s repeated “Gaullo-Mitterrandist” pledge on foreign policy is clearly meant to reassure the voters of his commitment to this sacrosanct principle. Accordingly, Macron celebrates the traditional tenets of French independence: autonomy of decision-making, the nuclear deterrent, and a certain skepticism toward American power and European deference towards Washington. In classic Gaullist terms, he warned against “those who have the habit of waiting for solutions to their problems from across the Atlantic”.

Far from a constraint on French independence, France’s alliances and cooperative relationships—particularly its membership of the EU—are key to maintaining French sovereignty. This is especially true for him if France aims at not only better protecting its interests, but profiting from global opportunities and retaining some influence on world events. Macron doesn’t accept that NATO is the main determinant of France’s status on the global stage. His vision of independence rests more on further integration in European defense, which he sees as key for Europe to “hold its destiny in its own hands.”

Contrary to the Euroskepticism adopted by many European politicians, Macron optimistically articulates a role for France in Europe that enhances rather than reduces its sovereignty. But, in Macron’s view, there is no question that the EU needs reform. In his words, the Brexit decision by U.K. voters “held up a mirror to the EU” and reflected a more broadly held view that the EU is both “dysfunctional and highly uninspiring.”

[D]espite the dysfunctions, for Macron the idea of fighting terrorism or competing with China without EU partners makes no sense.

But despite the dysfunctions, for Macron the idea of fighting terrorism or competing with China without EU partners makes no sense. Sovereignty for Macron is not the far-right delusion of complete independence, rather “sovereignty means the capacity of acting in concrete terms to protect ourselves and defend our values.” Macron thus promotes the idea of a “Europe of sovereignty” that enhances France’s independence by giving it the means, through cooperation with European partners, to defend French interests.

Ambiguity

The final pillar is ambiguity. Of course, ambiguity is not generally a concept that figures prominently in foreign policy programs, nor does Macron mention it. But it has obvious political value.

Macron has been willing to take some bold stances, such as on Europe or in support of air strikes in Syria. But on most foreign policy issues he has either embraced continuity or reveled in ambiguity to an extent that is unusual for French presidential candidates. He has been mostly silent on the issue of Trump, on relations with China and Russia, on questions of overseas development assistance, and on the strategy for fighting ISIS.

Admittedly, the debate during the campaign has forced Macron to come out more clearly on a few topics. In particular, he has confirmed that he wouldn’t support lifting sanctions against Russia until Russia met its obligations in Ukraine. On Syria, he stressed his differences with Hollande’s policy rather than proposing a clear strategy. He has insisted that it was a mistake to make Assad’s departure a precondition for negotiations, given that France is “totally isolated on this position.” But Macron also holds that that those who insist on Assad’s continued rule make “a diplomatic and moral mistake,” because that position “would eventually lead us to compromise and discuss with a bloody dictator.”

But the larger pattern has been to avoid specifics. Pundits have often mocked Macron’s tendency to equivocate during the campaign, particularly his constant use of the phrase “and at the same time.” Macron insists that he only wants to acknowledge the complexity of France’s problems. But on foreign policy, some of his ambiguities have more to do with keeping his options open. He has often insisted more on the principles of his foreign policy than on substance: he has often mentioned his ambition for France to be a “power of balance and dialogue,” his desire for a “clear and resolute diplomacy,” or his plan to hold a “realist and demanding discussion” with its partners, without offering many specifics.

This is not necessarily because Macron has no view. Rather, it reflects that fact that Macron’s youth and inexperience are on a certain level his main selling points. Like Barack Obama in 2008, he is not burdened by past decisions or unfortunate associations with now discredited positions. He has not supported or opposed controversial wars; he has never been involved in a corruption scandal; and he has never said a kind word about Vichy France or promoted Islamophobia.

Macron is rather an empty vessel into which large swathes of the electorate can pour their hopes and dreams about what France could be. This makes Macron’s policy difficult to predict, but he would have been foolish to give up his ambiguity. The optimism that Macron inspires and personifies flows in part from this lack of specificity.

Macron is rather an empty vessel into which large swathes of the electorate can pour their hopes and dreams about what France could be.

Reality bites

Macron presents a starkly different vision for foreign policy than his opponent, Marine Le Pen. Both promote the traditional idea of an independent France that commands its own destiny. But for Macron, independence is somewhat paradoxically achieved through interdependence and international cooperation. His preferred partners are those with whom France has formed enduring bonds and who offer France the chance to magnify its waning relative power through like-minded cooperation. This means workings first and foremost with Germany and France’s other EU partners, but also with a United States that is (hopefully) committed to the transatlantic alliance and to universal values.

But the world is not waiting for France to make its choice. Immediately after taking office, the next president of France will face a daunting array of ever-mutating challenges—an eroding world order, reluctant European partners, an aggressive Russia, an unstable Africa, and a deeply unpredictable America. He or she will have only a fragile domestic consensus and fairly limited national means to deal with these challenges.

As president, Macron will have to face those reality tests with limited experience and expertise. The world will quickly challenge his tendency toward ambiguity. He won’t be the first to seek a “demanding dialogue” with Putin’s Russia without obtaining results. His bold views on human rights, whether on Syria, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia or the United States will quickly meet realpolitik concerns. His reluctance to act militarily without a realistic exit strategy might be called to question if a jihadist threat suddenly emerges in Europe’s neighborhood as it did in Mali in 2013. Perhaps most fundamentally, Macron’s insistence on reforming the EU through working and compromising with Germany will face opposition within the rest of the European Union and test his ability to build coalitions in Europe around the Franco-German core.

Still, it is clear that Macron, for all of his inexperience and ambiguities, is offering France a more mature alternative than Le Pen. She offers only the comfortable delusion that France can insulate itself from outside influences, maintain its identity and security, and still prosper in the modern world. Trump and Brexit campaigners sold a similar tale to American and British voters. Macron, by contrast, seeks to more confidently leverage France’s strengths through its alliance relationships to help build a Europe and a world in which France can thrive. It is no easy task of course, but in a hyper-connected, ever-changing world, it is the only path forward.

One month into the Trump presidency, a trio of high-level U.S. officials—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—arrived in Europe for various high-level meetings at NATO, the European Union and the G-20. They brought with them a clear message: pay no attention to the president of the United States.

President Trump has said that NATO is obsolete. But don’t worry, Mattis assured nervous NATO partners; the United States is deeply committed to an “enduring transatlantic bond,” and NATO has its “full support.”

And while Trump has told a German newspaper that the EU is simply a vehicle for German interests, his vice president informed the EU’s assembled leaders that the United States has a “strong commitment…to continued cooperation and partnership with the European Union.”

Finally, Trump’s associates in Washington might be planning to offer Russia a new sweetheart peace deal on Ukraine. But fear not, Tillerson told the allies at the Berlin G-20 meeting; America will stand up for the interests and values of allies, and expects Russia to honor its commitment to the existing Minsk agreement.

Europeans were variously relieved, skeptical, and confused by the linguistic pirouettes performed by Trump’s cabinet. But, in the end, what should they make of a US administration whose president regularly tweets out bile against U.S. allies, but whose cabinet officials seek to calm alliance gatherings with the dulcet tones of the foreign policy establishment?

Only the president makes foreign policy

The main point to remember is that only the president can make foreign policy. The U.S. foreign policy process is essentially an advocacy system in which the institutional interests of the agencies fight with each other over policy. The various departments reliably represent distinct positions—where you sit is where you stand.

So the Defense Department represents the views of the armed services; the State Department supports the cause of good relations with allies; the Commerce Department promotes the interests of business abroad, etc. The president sits atop this squabbling mass of bureaucracy, injects a healthy dose of domestic politics into the mix through the White House staff, and arbitrates the result.

If this or any president absents himself from the process or simply fails to decide, the result is not that foreign policy gets delegated to the Vice President or the Secretary of Defense. It is that there is no coherent foreign policy at all.

The very existence of the president and his capacity to reverse bureaucratic decisions encourages all sides to refuse to compromise with each other and to try to gain his attention and support. President Trump is only peripatetically involved in such arcane matters as the maintenance of U.S. alliances. But his tendency to make policy from a weird mixture of boredom, dyspepsia, and the last person he talked to means that every bureaucratic entrepreneur in the government can dare to hope that his wild idea will soon become the law of the land.

This week, he appeared to give his cabinet in Europe hardly a thought while he spent the weekend whipping up the faithful at an early re-election rally in Florida. He has said practically nothing about his underlings’ efforts in Europe to contradict his policy pronouncements. But this very detachment undermines the idea that the sober sounding gentlemen on the other side of the Atlantic can credibly commit America to any given foreign policy.

So, tonight’s off-the-cuff remark or tomorrow’s 3am tweet might undo a week of careful diplomacy in Brussels. This weekend’s unexpected victim was that hapless hotbed of criminality, Sweden. Tomorrow, it could be the innocent Caribbean republic of San Escobar, which despite not existing, has nonetheless faced more than its share of diplomatic crises lately.

To be fair to the president, he has over the last eighteen months—indeed, over the past three decades—espoused a fairly coherent set of foreign policy principles, if not policies. One of the most important such principles is that the United States gets a raw deal from its allies, and that U.S. alliances need to be renegotiated to put America first. He is unlikely to have found humility on this point through winning the presidential election.

All this means that the reassurances of even the most senior officials in the administration amount to very little. Unfortunately, we have to pay attention to the president of the United States. Indeed, when you think about it, it is very surprising that this even needs to be said.

Everybody knows Hillary Clinton, and everybody particularly knows her foreign policy views. After all, she has been a presence in national politics for more than 25 years and has a long record as first lady, senator, and secretary of state.

Most believe that Hillary Clinton is a “hawk” on foreign policy, and that as president, she would escalate current U.S. military commitments in the Middle East and elsewhere, dragging America into more military misadventures in various far-flung corners of the world.

For instance, the New York Times’ Mark Landler writes that “her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm.”

Clinton has indeed often favored the use of force. But President Hillary Clinton would not likely be the uber hawk that so many expect. First, her record is in fact more nuanced than is often appreciated—she has just as often pushed for diplomatic solutions as military ones.

But more importantly, it is because, as president, she will find that the use of force abroad will offer precious few opportunities for making a difference, and will come at a considerable political cost at home.

The case for Hillary the Hawk

Portrayals of Hillary Clinton as super-hawkish on foreign policy typically point to a number of decisions she’s made over the years to support the use military force.

As first lady in the 1990s, she supported U.S. intervention in the former Yugoslavia. As a senator, she voted for the war in Iraq in 2003. She supported the troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009. As secretary of state, she advocated military intervention in Libya in 2011 and forceful measures in Syria (for example, the early arming of the moderate opposition and more recently the creation of safe or no-fly zones). Where others wavered, she supported the use of force to kill Osama bin Laden.

On the campaign trail, she has supported President Barack Obama’s decisions to deploy more special forces and intensify air strikes against the ISIS. Many of her advisers are prominent advocates of increased use of the military, particularly in Syria.

So it’s easy to look at her history and her belief in American leadership and exceptionalism and conclude that there will be no rest for war-weary Americans.

Clinton has been a hawk, but a prudent one

But while there is no doubt that Clinton has often supported the use of force, she just as frequently supported diplomacy and negotiations as the nation’s first line of defense.

As the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Aaron David Miller noted recently in the Wall Street Journal, Clinton frequently complained about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy when she was secretary of state and touted the virtues of “smart power” (the idea that all elements of national power are needed to solve foreign policy problems) and diplomacy in tackling the nation’s most serious national security challenges.

Consistent with this approach, she started the secret negotiations with Iran in 2012 that ultimately led to the Iran nuclear deal. She has similarly supported President Obama’s opening to Cuba. She supported and implemented the reset with Russia that began in 2009.

When China started becoming aggressive in the South China Sea, she did not reach for military tools, but rather looked to a regional diplomatic approach that stood in stark contrast to Beijing’s military aggression.

A President Clinton will have few opportunities for military intervention

And indeed, there will arguably be less need and less scope for her to show her military mettle as president than might have been the case a couple of years ago. It should be obvious, to paraphrase Woody Allen’s observation about life, that all the options for the use of force to repair a badly broken Middle East can be divided into the miserable and the horrible.

In Syria, the idea of risking U.S. boots on the ground or war with the Russians to support an opposition that consists largely of Islamist extremists is not likely to appeal to her any more than it has to President Obama.

For fighting ISIS, Clinton seems comfortable with Obama’s template for the use of military force: the limited use of armed drones, special operations forces, air strikes, and efforts to build local capacity for ground operations and stabilization duties.

Clinton has often emphasized that terrorism cannot be fully defeated on the battlefield. To deal with the evolving threat of transnational Islamic extremism, Clinton asserts, the real payoff lies in improved intelligence and law enforcement, greater international cooperation, limiting access to weapons, and efforts to stop radicalization and terrorist recruitment.

Clinton wants to be a domestic president

The most important reason that a President Hillary Clinton is unlikely to have a hawkish foreign policy is that she will no longer be a senator, or the secretary of state, or a presidential candidate. She will be president. And that means that her priorities will be very different.

There is an old adage in politics that where you stand depends on where you sit. And from where President Clinton would be sitting in the White House, the world—and more importantly, the domestic political context—will look different than it looked from her perch at the State Department.

As secretary of state, her views on matters of war and peace were shaped to some extent by the institutional viewpoint of the State Department. The secretary of state does not need to worry about domestic policy or the president’s public approval rating. As president, though, Clinton will be beholden to the American public and will have many other priorities beyond foreign policy that will occupy her attention.

As recent presidents have learned, military intervention abroad can carry a heavy political price at home. Despite the headlines of global disorder, there is no clamor from the American public or the Congress for a more active military policy, except from a handful of charter members of the Washington foreign policy establishment (or, as Obama’s aide Ben Rhodes described it, the “blob”).

This was broadly seen on the campaign trail in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, when hawkishness emerged as a political liability that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump profited from. A recent Pew survey, for example, found that 57 percent of Americans surveyed want the U.S. to deal with its own problems, while letting other countries get along as best they can. Only 27 percent of respondents felt that the United States is doing too little to solve world problems.

Asserting “lost” American leadership through the use of military force in Syria or elsewhere might make the foreign policy establishment and the editorial board of the Washington Post happy. But an overwhelming number of Republicans and Democrats in Congress as well as the general public would sour very quickly on prolonged, open-ended interventions that cost billions of dollars and risk American lives.

Clinton has the smarts to understand that she can only fight and win so many political battles as president. Clinton was an accidental secretary of state—she had not focused on foreign policy previously, she did not seek the position, and she did not get the job because of her experience in diplomacy.

She wants to make her mark in domestic policy and she will likely reserve her political capital to make the deals and compromises that will be necessary to advance her domestic policy agenda.

To do otherwise—to let her and her administration’s time and energy get taken up by unpopular military engagements—would not only break faith with the progressive wing of the party, but could also hurt her standing with the public.

Her husband’s administration spent much of its early political capital recovering from the October 1993 “Black Hawk Down” disaster, in which 18 U.S. Army Rangers were killed in Somalia. For Hillary Clinton, getting bogged down militarily in Syria at the outset of her administration, for example, could so reduce her political standing and so occupy her time that she would have little room left to implement her domestic agenda.

In the end, Clinton as president will likely continue to defy the labels of hawk or dove and continue to annoy advocates of both approaches. She may at times be more tempted than her predecessor to reach into the tool kit and pull out a military instrument to push back on enemies and adversaries.

But like her predecessor, she will not risk her political standing unless she is convinced that there is a strong case for how such an intervention will both improve the situation on the ground and meet with the approval of the American public. In the next four years, such cases will be few and far between.

Note: A previous version of this article claimed that Hillary Clinton supported the Iraq surge in 2007. She did not, and the sentence was corrected on August 19, 2016.

Editors’ Note: The attempted coup in Turkey was, for many observers, reminiscent of another recent July uprising in a key American ally: the 2013 military takeover in Egypt. These coups were a disaster for U.S. policy in both cases, and would have been regardless of how they turned out, argues Jeremy Shapiro. This post originally appeared on Vox.

Friday’s attempted military coup in Turkey demonstrates that yet another U.S. partner in the Middle East seems to be descending into domestic unrest. The spectacle was, for many observers, reminiscent of another recent July uprising in a key American ally: the 2013 military takeover in Egypt. There, as in Turkey, a powerful military in a country with a history of coups rebelled against a democratically elected Islamist government.

Egyptians and Turks alike will naturally reject such comparisons and emphasize the unique nature of their respective situations—not least that the coup in Egypt succeeded and the one in Turkey failed. They have a point. The differences in the local political context are more important than the superficial similarities.

But from an American perspective, there is a key similarity: These coups were a disaster for U.S. policy in both cases, and would have been regardless of how they turned out.

How does the United States end up in this no-win situation so frequently? Why is domestic unrest in faraway countries like Egypt and Turkey such a problem for the United States?

The essential problem is that the United States cannot just do foreign policy business with its partners. Because of America’s own values and domestic politics, it needs to get involved in their domestic political struggles. It needs to promote democracy and civil society in its partners and to take positions on controversial domestic issues such as the proper functioning of democratic institutions and the protection of human rights or media freedom.

This means that when domestic politics explodes, the United States is often caught in the middle.

Partnership isn’t enough

Both Egypt and Turkey are “key security partners” of the United States. This means the U.S. government needs these countries to deal with critical security issues.

Turkey is a NATO ally that sits at the crossroads of practically every geopolitical issue in the Middle East. It is particularly critical for the fight against ISIS. The United States and its anti-ISIS coalition partners supply their partners on the ground in Syria through Turkish territory and use the military base at Incirlik in Turkey to launch airstrikes against ISIS. The foreign fighters that replenish ISIS’s ranks have also often come into Syria via Turkey.

Egypt is also seen as an important partner for counterterrorism. It is struggling to cope with jihadist groups, some of them linked to ISIS, in the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt also provides the United States military with privileged access to the strategic Suez Canal, helps keep the peace with Israel, and helps ensure that weapons that might be used to attack Israel don’t get to Hamas through Egypt’s border with Gaza.

One could argue about whether these are truly important security interests for the United States. But the key point is that successive American governments since, in the case of Turkey in the 1950s and in the case of Egypt in the 1970s, have accepted that they are.

They have accordingly sought to build an effective partnership with both countries. The United States is committed, through NATO, to defend Turkey in case of aggression. And the United States provides Egypt with more than $1.3 billion a year in military assistance and $150 million a year in economic assistance, making it the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world (after Israel).

But the United States can’t just give these guarantees and this money without taking on some moral responsibility for what goes on in these countries. Debates over these countries in U.S. domestic politics reflects this sense of moral responsibility.

If the Egyptian military overthrows a democratically elected government, U.S. Congressmembers will quite naturally ask why the United States is giving nearly $1.5 billion a year to a government that shoots peaceful protesters in the street. If the Turkish government suppresses media freedom or arrests judges, U.S. human rights groups will similarly question why the United States accepts such actions by a NATO ally.

Hoping to escape from this dilemma, the U.S. government has long sought to promote the Western values of democracy and human rights in its security partners.

But particularly in the Middle East, this has rarely worked. The United States doesn’t really know how to democratize these societies, and in any case, it values its security relationship with the government too much to exert sustained pressure.

So even as the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected government, the United States continued to give it military aid. Even as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has moved in an increasingly authoritarian direction, the United States has stepped up its security cooperation with Turkey over ISIS.

The result is a hypocrisy that is evident and annoying to both the government and its opposition. Every effort to pressure governments on human rights elicits furious reactions and denials. And when, despite the rhetoric about human rights from U.S. officials, nothing really improves, the population grows cynical about U.S. motives.

So every effort to build up civil society organizations spawns a million conspiracy theories about U.S. involvement in domestic politics.

The crucible of a coup

Military coups or revolutions in U.S. partners always bring these tensions out into the open. They force the United States to confront in extremely fraught circumstances whether it most prizes its security relationship or its commitment to democratic values.

Usually, it can’t decide. The immediate reaction tends to be both muddled and seen through a lens of decades of built-up distrust of the United States. The conspiracy theorists find ample evidence for every preconceived notion.

The reaction to the Turkish coup has been a textbook example of this dynamic. The U.S. government condemned the coup, but it took several hours. The Turkish government interpreted this as hedging and evidence of ill will.

If the United States wanted to break out of the vicious cycle, it would either have to end its security partnership with Turkey or accept that that partnership means accepting Turkish authoritarianism. But if experience is any guide, the United States will not take either of those paths.

As in Egypt, the U.S. relationship with Turkey will probably survive these events, albeit in diminished form. After a period of distancing, both sides will accept that they need each other for their mutual security problems too much to allow a complete breakdown.

But at the same time, the distrust of the United States within the government and the hatred of the United States within the population will grow. The U.S.-Turkey relationship will fail to evolve into a true alliance of trust and thus be of limited use in defeating ISIS or ending the civil war with the Kurds in Turkey.

In the meantime, Turkey’s roiled domestic politics will continue as Erdoğan attempts to cleanse Turkish politics of his opponents. The next coup or revolution may be the last that the strained U.S.-Turkish alliance can withstand.

Editors’ Note: U.S. allies behave the way they do because we let them, write Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky. Washington has become so focused on maintaining its relationships with its allies that it’s forgotten what the relationships were for in the first place: securing U.S. interests. This post originally appeared on Vox.

It is satisfying and certainly trendy to complain about America’s allies. President Barack Obama unloaded on them recently in an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, calling them “free riders” who rely on the Unites States for security but refuse to pay back. The commentariat has piled on, with a special focus on deteriorating relations with such perennial malcontents as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey.

The truth is that our allies behave the way they do because we let them. We provide billions of dollars in military and other aid to countries in order to protect and advance U.S. interests, yet we fail to use this leverage to induce the recipients of this aid to behave in a way that actually advances U.S. interests.

That’s because the United States has become so focused on maintaining its relationships with its allies above all else that it’s forgotten what the relationships were for in the first place: securing U.S. interests.

In part, this is a holdover from the days of the Cold War, when what mattered was who was on “our side” and who was on the “their side” in the great ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. In other words, it was the alliance relationship itself that mattered more than anything. What our friends did on their own time in their own countries and regions didn’t really matter, as long as they stayed our friends.

But that’s not the world we live in today. In today’s complex world, where most nations pursue cooperative and conflicting policies across different issues, the United States should focus less on making our allies happy and more on making them actually behave like allies.

[T]he United States should focus less on making our allies happy and more on making them actually behave like allies.

Allies behaving badly

President Obama is hardly the first president to complain about U.S. allies. Indeed, there is a long history of U.S. allies and client states accepting billions of dollars in American military and economic largesse only to pursue policies against US interests or carp about American unreliability. In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton had his first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After the meeting, in which the leader of one of America’s most pampered allies had lectured Clinton at length, Clinton reportedly fumed, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

Pakistan is perhaps the most egregious example of an ally behaving badly. As Lawrence Wright has documented, despite (and arguably because of) the billions of dollars the United States has invested in its relationship with Pakistan since 1954, its government (or, more precisely, its military) has diverted U.S. military assistance to build nuclear weapons; harbored Islamic militant groups that kill American soldiers in Afghanistan; sheltered the Taliban and al-Qaida sympathizers (and probably Osama bin Laden); and gave succor to the AQ Khan network, which became a WMD Walmart for countries like North Korea, Libya, and Iran that were shopping around for equipment and expertise on how to build nuclear weapons.

Egypt is another case: The United States has given Egypt billions of dollars in military assistance since 1979, avowedly for the purposes of maintaining Israeli-Egyptian peace, which Egypt manifestly has no interest or intention in breaking. But beyond that, the theory is that by maintaining links with the Egyptian military elite, the United States would be in a position create in the Egyptian officer corps a pro-Western force for democratization.

Alas, 35 years into that experiment, in July 2013, the Egyptian officer corps overthrew the democratically elected Egyptian government and has since brutally suppressed all opposition to their rule. A U.S.-trained former Army general is now Egypt’s dictator, but he shows little special inclination toward democracy or Western interests.

Saudi Arabia is yet another example. The Saudi regime is totally dependent on US military, logistics, training, and intelligence support. The Kingdom has no strategic alternative to U.S. protection, and its leaders know it. Yet Saudi frequently acts against US interests in the region: trying to stop the Iran nuclear deal, funding Islamic extremist causes across the region, and undermining U.S. efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Syria.

So why do successive administrations continue to provide massive handouts to America’s clients when we often get little—and sometimes worse—in return?

Domestic lobbies and the influence of powerful constituents like the U.S. defense industry no doubt play a role in inhibiting the United States from holding allies and clients to account for behavior that is inimical to U.S. interests. This is especially the case with countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt that procure billions of dollars worth of sophisticated U.S. weapons.

But these defense industrial interests don’t explain why even American allies like Turkey that don’t buy much weaponry get away with these behaviors. And they don’t explain why even those U.S. agencies like the State Department that have little to do with the defense industry consistently advocate for allied interests.

Cold War legacy: either “with us” or “against us”

The better answer is that the Cold War created pathologies that have become deeply embedded in America’s foreign policymaking machinery, and particularly the priority it places on “alliance management.”

During the Cold War, the United States conveniently divided the world into those countries who were “with us” or “against us” in the global contest for ideological, military, and geopolitical supremacy between the US and the Soviet Union. The United States had a diplomatic playbook for dealing with countries in both categories: reward and buy off your allies and clients in return for their solidarity and support in the fight against communism; contain, punish, isolate, and pressure your enemies for supporting the Soviet Union.

When it came to relations with our allies, what really mattered was that they stood with us in the broader conflict—everything else was easily forgiven or not even noticed in the name of maintaining the alliance. Overall, this philosophy helped maintain an effective anti-Soviet front, even when U.S. allies committed all manner of sins. As was often said about U.S. support for brutal dictators during the Cold War, “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Today, most countries in the world are neither enemies nor vassals of the United States. The United States works with Saudi Arabia to maintain stability in the oil market, for example, but winces at its role as “the chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture.” Egypt supports US efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine, but prosecutes U.S.-funded NGO workers, including the son of the U.S. secretary of transportation, for trying to promote democracy in Egypt. Qatar hosts an American air base that is critical in the fight against ISIS, but actively undermines U.S. policy in Libya and Syria, contributing to the chaos in those countries that allows ISIS to thrive.

These relationships are rife with both cooperation and conflict for the simple reason that some U.S. and partner interests are compatible while others clash. Without the Cold War to provide discipline and context for allied deviations, such clashes come to define the relationship. Many of America’s most important foreign relationships fall into this category, but Washington still behaves as if the alliance relationship itself is the most important factor.

How this enables bad behavior by our allies

Reverse Leverage: Many U.S. allies are highly dependent on U.S. support—military, economic, diplomatic, and intelligence—and they should be bending over backward to maintain that support. Yet it is more often Washington that performs the awkward gymnastics, bending over backward to keep relations smooth and assistance flowing.

Qatar, for example, is a tiny country full of natural resources surrounded by neighbors that loathe its government. It is fully dependent on the United States for its protection. Yet U.S. officials are afraid to call out Qatar for its actions in Syria and Libya lest the United States lose its military base.

So, rather than leveraging Qatar’s dependence on the US for its entire survival to induce Qatar to stop acting against US interests in Syria and Libya, the United States allows Qatar to leverage the United States need for a military base in the region to induce the United States to shut up and let it do whatever it wants.

[I]t is more often Washington that performs the awkward gymnastics, bending over backward to keep relations smooth and assistance flowing.

Moral Hazard: In the diplomatic version of helicopter parenting, the United States protects its client states from suffering the full consequences of their behavior by bailing them out of trouble, incurring the costs and adverse consequences rather than making their putative ally bear the consequences of their actions.

The result is a classic case of “moral hazard.” For example, when Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in Yemen against US advice, the U.S. response was nonetheless to support the intervention, specifically to ensure that Saudi Arabia would not feel the full consequences of failure. Naturally, the lesson that the Saudis learned is that the United States will back them back no matter what they do.

And in Yemen, this unconditional support has adversely affected important U.S. interests: The increased violence and chaos caused by Saudi military intervention has empowered al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen and still considered by the US to be a dangerous threat to the US homeland. It has diverted Saudi assets from the campaign against ISIS, and it has escalated the conflict between the Saudis and Iran, which is having a destabilizing effect throughout the region.

Endless Reassurance: President Obama complained in the Atlantic interview that Saudi Arabia’s competition with Iran is helping “to feed proxy wars and chaos” in the Middle East, yet he made a personal trip to Saudi Arabia just last week to reassure the Saudis of the US commitment to Saudi Arabia’s security.

But why should the United States care if Saudi Arabia feels like we’re abandoning it?

Rather than trying to reassure the Saudis, the United States should be leveraging Saudi fears of abandonment—along with the billions of dollars in arms the United States sells Saudi Arabia—to compel it to curb its actions in the region that are feeding proxy wars and chaos.

It’s not you, it’s me

As one U.S. administration official noted, “Our allies all give us headaches, except for Australia. You can always count on Australia.” That’s great about Australia, but the overall pattern suggests it’s time to start looking closer to home for the source of these problems. If you have one bad ally, you can blame the ally; if you have all bad allies (except Australia), maybe it’s you.

“A lot of the issues that we focus on as crises on a daily basis—I think particularly of Syria—they are certainly crises in their own right,” says Jeremy Shapiro. “But to my mind the failure to deal with them does have a lot to do with the consequences of the breakdown in international order and the breakdown in the international capacity to create order.”

Jeremy Shapiro, fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy and the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, gives his view on the top foreign policy issues of the day and in the 2016 presidential election.

“The interesting thing about terrorism is that it is never, at least for advanced societies, a direct threat in any existential way, despite what many of our politicians say,” argues Shapiro in this podcast, “What can threaten a nation like ours is that in the process of responding to an attack like in San Bernardino or in Paris that we destroy the things that are most precious to us, like our freedoms, like our civil liberties, that we engage in foreign policy adventures in order to try to make ourselves feel more secure and more safe that actually erode our power.”

Also in this podcast: The final installment of the Paris climate conference series by Bruce Jones, vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings. And also stay tuned for our regular economic update with David Wessel, senior fellow and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

The downing of a Russian jet by Turkish fighters has brought the dangers posed by Moscow’s intervention in Syria into sharp relief. While the Russian and Turkish Presidents trade insults and display their competitive machismo, the world faces the prospect of a military crisis between Russia and NATO. Although we do not yet know what Russia’s response will be, we can safely assume that it will not increase the prospects of peace and stability in Syria.

Cooler heads should put a stop to this escalatory spiral now. The United States should take immediate efforts not only to stop further conflict between Ankara and Moscow, but also to forge significantly greater cooperation between Russia and the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition. In so doing, Washington can both prevent incidents such as this one from recurring, and more effectively address the Syrian civil war and the fight against extremists there.

The proxy war that dare not speak its name

Notwithstanding the joint diplomatic efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, this incident actually fits into a pattern: The United States and its allies on the one hand, and Russia and its allies on the other have for months been engaged in a tit-for-tat proxy war in Syria. Despite the handshakes in Vienna, on the battlefield the United States and its allies, including Turkey, seem to consider Russia an adversary, with several steps taken to counter Russia’s intervention directly, including a major increase in the provision of anti-tank missiles to rebel groups. One such missile reportedly hit a Russian helicopter involved in the mission to rescue the downed pilots on Tuesday and killed a Russian marine.

Moscow has clearly been eager—almost to the point of desperation—for more cooperation with Washington and its coalition partners. Ever since the Russian bombing began, the Kremlin has been twisting itself in knots to engage the United States on Syria: Everything from a proposal to send a Prime Minister Medvedev-led inter-agency delegation to Washington for talks; a bid for enhanced military negotiations; and various ideas for deeper intelligence sharing. President Vladimir Putin, not someone known for a supplicant’s pose, has repeated his openness to enhanced cooperation with the United States over Syria like a mantra for almost two months—and he continues to do so, despite being consistently spurned by the Obama administration.

That spurning is certainly morally and politically justified. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea are brazenly illegal acts. Its intervention in support of a Syrian regime that is slaughtering its own people on a nearly daily basis lacks any conceivable moral justification. But in Syria, there is perhaps a higher moral and strategic calling—stopping further ISIS attacks, ending the war and the killing, reducing the flow of refugees, and avoiding a dangerous escalation toward a great power war. Those goals will require cooperation with Russia.

Current U.S. policy—escalating a proxy war by countering Russia’s moves on the ground, and conditioning cooperation on counter-ISIS strategy with progress in Vienna—rests on an assumption that Russia will eventually abandon its long-held positions on Syria and adopt U.S. ones, either due to setbacks on the battlefield or out of its desire to join up with the Western anti-ISIS alliance.

Similar efforts to change Russia’s calculus have been ongoing for over three years now. There has been precious little to show for them. Far from responding to pressure on the battlefield by compromising, Russia has doubled down in its support and escalated the struggle at every juncture.

A new approach to Syria

A new approach is necessary. This approach would have two simultaneous elements.

First, the United States and Russia would agree to set aside the issue of Assad in their bilateral relations and at the Vienna talks, declaring themselves neutral on the issue of his role in the political transition. Such a step would actually represent a return to the letter of the June 2012 Geneva Communiqué; since then, both countries’ positions have in fact departed from that compromise. Returning to it would mean that the future leadership of the country will be determined by a process of negotiation among the various Syrian parties, with outside powers playing only a mediating role. U.S. and Russian neutrality on this issue in the Vienna talks might not immediately produce an agreement—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the various Syrian groups would continue to struggle over this and other contentious issues—but without it an agreement would be impossible.

Second, putting this issue aside in the Vienna talks should allow Moscow and Washington to focus on what they do agree on in Syria, namely the anti-ISIS struggle. The United States and Russia are not in a position to join each other’s anti-ISIS coalition, particularly since Russia’s contains the Assad regime. But they could serve as inter-coalition liaisons, attempting to find common ground between the coalitions on issues of targeting, military strategy, de-confliction and broader counter-ISIS and counter-extremism efforts in Syria and beyond. At best, such an effort might allow for a much more effective anti-ISIS effort; at worst, it would offer a more counterterrorism-focused channel for the United States to make the case to the Russian military to modify its approach to the conflict and for all relevant militaries to maintain the kind of regular communication that can prevent incidents like Tuesday’s clash.

Deepening engagement, however distasteful, with Russia on Syria must be seen as a necessary—even if not sufficient—step in bringing the nightmare there to an end; in preventing further terrorist attacks like those in Paris, Sinai, and Beirut; and in avoiding inadvertent escalation. It will not eliminate differences with Moscow, particularly on issues like Ukraine. But the other options available to the United States—countering Russia on the battlefield or doing nothing while hoping that President Erdoğan and President Putin can remain calm—will almost certainly make the situation in Syria worse, and could well lead to a much bigger calamity.

]]>
Ten months after the terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and a Kosher supermarket, Paris has been hit savagely again, with 130 people dead and hundreds more injured. This time, the terrorists did not take aim at a satirical newspaper, but rather targeted France’s youth as they were unwinding at a concert, soccer match, restaurants, and bars. It has been decades since France encountered such devastating violence. Why is the country now a prime target of terrorism? How does the attack relate to French foreign policy in the Middle East? What are the consequences for politics and society on both sides of the Atlantic? How should the international community respond?

To discuss France, Europe, and the aftershocks of terrorism, the Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) at Brookings convened a panel of experts on the eve of French President Hollande’s visit to Washington. Speakers were Philippe Le Corre and Kemal Kirişci of CUSE, Joseph Bahout of the Carnegie Endowment, and Laure Mandeville of Le Figaro. Brookings Fellow Jeremy Shapiro provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

]]>
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/business-travel-is-about-who-you-meet-not-what-you-learn/Business travel is about who you meet not what you learnhttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/172290490/0/brookingsrss/experts/shapiroj~Business-travel-is-about-who-you-meet-not-what-you-learn/
Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.brookings.edu?p=131278&post_type=opinion&preview_id=131278

Despite such reticence, however, a closer look at U.S. policy reveals, for better or for worse, a subtle but more assertive U.S. reaction to confront what Washington perceives as a challenge from Russia. That challenge is not just about Syria, but also about the U.S. role in Middle East and the very concept of U.S. leadership abroad. The Russians have demonstrated this challenge both by striking directly at U.S.-supported groups on the ground in Syria (rather than ISIS or even the Nusra Front) and by combining their offensive in Syria with an outreach to the Sunni powers in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, all traditional U.S. allies. The U.S. desire to avoid getting drawn into a proxy war with Russia in Syria is genuine. But this broader challenge tugs at the American impulse for leadership and demands a response. And there has been a response.

That reaction requires nuance. Too public or too forceful an approach risks sparking a broader conflict with Russia and sucking the United States into the Syrian quagmire. Too weak a response will play badly in U.S. domestic politics and reduce U.S. leverage with regional allies. The middle way seeks to challenge Russia indirectly, to capitalize on Russia’s many weaknesses in Syria, and to ensure that Russia cannot succeed there. It also looks to draw Russia into a diplomatic process that will offer Moscow a face-saving way out of the morass of Syria.

Map of Syria showing control by cities and areas held. Credit: Reuters.

A military tit-for-tat

Inside Syria, the United States has quietly countered the Russian buildup to keep Russia from any major gains on the ground that could translate into leverage at the negotiating table. Indeed, it is remarkable, after over a month of sustained Russian air strikes and ground offensives by the regime and its allies, just how little ground has been gained and how little the military balance has changed. In very little time, the sense of impending regime victory provided by Russia’s dramatic moves has evaporated and the prospect of a quagmire looms.

At the same time that the United States is helping to ensure that Russia does not succeed in western Syria, it is seeking to up its game in the anti-ISIS war in eastern Syria and Iraq. This is sending a message to its regional allies and to Russia that the United States remains the critical extra-regional actor in the conflict. Since the Russian intervention, the U.S. government has announced it will put U.S. special forces on the ground for the first time, dropped 50 tons of ammunition to Kurdish fighters in northern Syria (despite vociferous Turkish objections), and provided air support for a major offensive toward Sinjar in Iraq as well as an offensive toward Raqqa in Syria.

The ISIS war and the Syrian civil war are often portrayed, even by U.S. policymakers, as separate struggles. But they are in fact closely intertwined. If the United States makes progress against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, it will relieve pressure on the non-ISIS Syrian opposition and free them to present an even greater challenge to the Assad regime and their external supporters.

Diplomatic maneuvers

Meanwhile in Vienna, the United States has deployed its most fearsome diplomatic weapon: Secretary of State John Kerry. He has plunged full-force into a negotiating process that most analysts of the Syrian war see as hopeless. The Russian intervention has not brought the sides closer together or induced major concessions from supporters of the opposition. The biggest sticking point remains the question of Assad’s guaranteed departure, a U.S., Turkish, and Saudi demand to which Russia and Iran firmly object.

But seen from a broader perspective, the Vienna talks can serve U.S. purposes even if they do not produce any sort of agreement. They demonstrate the U.S. power to convene all sides and they provide a forum, when the time is ripe, for the Russians to seek a face-saving way out of what may become a Syrian quagmire.

And regardless of its actual coherence, Russia likely sees these American efforts as a response to their intervention. This is evidenced by their military engagement structured to face U.S. force and diplomatic maneuvering framed to counter U.S. rhetoric.

As a hedge, this response continually tests the possibility that the overarching U.S. strategy might need to change and serves to experiment with the means to improve it. True, this doesn’t pass any sort of test of strategic coherence. But it may serve the more prosaic purpose of countering the Russian challenge to U.S. leadership in the region, while avoiding the Russian mistake of getting sucked into an unwinnable war.